The Social Well-Being Index reveals a downward evolutionary trajectory of the entire globalized West, including Europe west of the borders of the Union State of Belarus and the Russian Federation. At the same time, one cannot fail to notice the wide dispersion in the rankings of Western European countries: from Ireland and Denmark, which still rank among the global top five in the SWI, to Spain and Bulgaria, which occupy 75th and 78th places respectively. This configuration aptly fits the notion of a “Europe of different speeds,” but in a different sense: it is about different speeds of decline.
The habitual reference to the divide between a highly developed Western core and a catching-up Eastern periphery of Europe no longer helps to explain what is happening. Spain’s proximity to Bulgaria and Romania’s to Italy at relatively low positions in the SWI rankings clearly shows that such explanations no longer work. Moreover, the high rankings of Slovakia (6th), Slovenia (10th), and the Czech Republic (11th), as well as Hungary (23rd) and Poland (26th), compared with the modest positions of France (28th), Germany (43rd), and the United Kingdom (54th), completely overturn the familiar hierarchy of European well-being. Let us try to understand why.
The causes of decline
Any reflection on Europe’s decline at different speeds should logically begin with identifying its causes. Here it is worth turning to the striking book by French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, in which he explains the reasons for the inevitable Defeat of the West. To underscore the topicality of his forecast, Todd initially speaks of the defeat of Western “liberal oligarchy” in its confrontation with Russian “authoritarian democracy.” He then clarifies, however, that a clash with Russia could have been avoided, whereas the West’s defeat itself was inevitable.
Only a year passed after the book’s publication for the forecast to come true—at least with regard to Europe. Acting on its own initiative, “to spite” Russia and to please the United States, Europe deprived itself of its competitive advantages and very quickly, and under Trump already officially, became a coveted source of sustenance for the hungry North American empire. Thus, Todd’s book is not so much a forecast as a chronicle of an announced geopolitical suicide.
According to Todd, the historical rise of the West was a side social effect of the religious Counter-Reformation. Protestantism required believers to engage directly with Scripture, which meant literacy and education, and ultimately produced an effective workforce. Moreover, by insisting on translating the Bible into vernacular languages, Luther and his followers made a major contribution to the formation of national cultures and militant nation-states: Cromwell’s England, Gustavus Adolphus’s Sweden, Frederick II’s Prussia.
The current decline of the West occurs insofar as its religion fades away. Along with it, nations disintegrate, national states weaken, and all resources concentrate in the hands of a globalized liberal oligarchy that manipulates increasingly atomized masses losing their cultural identity. Todd concludes that the United States and the United Kingdom, which form the civilizational core of the West, have reached a zero state of religion and nationhood and are therefore doomed to degradation and geopolitical defeat.
This conclusion is logical and clear. Yet the question remains: why is this happening? If bibliocentric monotheistic religion and the political nation ensured the rise of the West, why does Western civilization now reduce them to dust?
Todd rightly links the dying of religion, family, and state—the universal foundations of human civilization—to the triumph of individualism sliding into nihilism. But is not the individualization of human beings the very essence of the evolution of human culture? Is not the maximization of individualism the key factor in the transformation of Traditional Humanity into Modern Humanity—that is, the main and increasingly dominant trend of Progress?
Let us combine Karl Popper’s postulate about the triumph of individualism with Émile Durkheim’s fundamental idea of population density as a factor of the division of labor, clarifying that the issue lies not only in the number of people, but in the intensity of their informational exchanges, determined by the level of urbanization and the development of communication technologies. Recall that Durkheim’s concept of “organic solidarity,” supposedly arising from differentiation and increasing complexity of society, is merely a hypothesis refuted by social practice. Social differentiation multiplies human discord. Growing individualization, eliminating traditional values and taboos, corrodes social bonds.
By the beginning of the 21st century, several factors converged and entered into resonance: humanity became globally urbanized while simultaneously transitioning to digital communications; liberal culture, reflecting and cultivating individualism, became dominant worldwide regardless of official ideology. The communicative implosion in the digitized global “human anthill” produced unexpected results: a progressive increase in stupefying informational noise and a general crisis of social structuredness—runaway variability of all structures of human existence and consciousness.
Thus, all of modern humanity, not just the West, is experiencing a total crisis. No local civilization or individual community has immunity against the rising force of nihilism and desocialization—that is, dehumanization. In a world of overthrown values and trampled taboos, only a state of the civic nation can stabilize society, insofar as it is interested in and capable of ensuring the rule of law and supporting the family institution and traditional religions as its social base. Therefore, the quality of the national state today determines the power and fate of nations.
Historically, the national state emerged in the West, becoming a factor of its civilizational superiority. Over time, this Western advantage in social organization became less evident, and with the triumph of capitalist West at the end of the 20th century it disappeared altogether—only seemingly paradoxical. The globalization of financial capitalism decisively strengthened and inspired the liberal oligarchy to weaken and dismantle national states under the assumed U.S. monopoly on foreign-policy violence. The shift to corporate and network technologies of social formatting in the interests of global financial elites was presented as a project of an increasingly open and free digital society.
In reality, the basis and goal of the global liberal project was a system of financial neocolonialism. Its necessary components included curbing demographic growth, youth migration from poor to rich countries, active erosion of nations through the cultivation of consumerist hedonistic individualism, and, as a result, further divergence between ruling elites and managed masses of Homo sapiens as innovative technologies of regulating physical and mental life were introduced.
The dialectic of history is such that the West—being the civilizational center of modernization, urbanization, and the communication revolution—became the vanguard of progress and succeeded more than anyone else in destroying traditional foundations and asserting individualism. This led to the triumph of relativism in philosophy, nihilism in culture, and complete freedom of the elite in its “public relations.” Progressivism reached its apogee in the West’s global liberal project, whose implementation intensified the general crisis of social structuredness. Therefore, precisely in the West, in Todd’s terms, the zero stage of religion and the civic nation has been reached, constituting the combined cause of civilizational decline.
Financial capitalism has driven former economic leaders into a post-industrial dead end. Over the past 25 years, Western Europe’s share of the global economy has nearly halved and continues to shrink. If at the beginning of the 20th century Europe accounted for nearly 30% of the world’s population, today its demographic weight does not even reach 10%. Immigration, intended to compensate for population decline and stimulate the European economy, led instead to reduced labor productivity and became a trigger of social crisis. European nations—once considered the elite half of the “golden billion”—are rapidly aging, childless, surrendering their homes, ancestral altars, and young women to immigrants, and now look not like a model of prosperity but like a withered branch of world history.
Which European nations are more prosperous
Understanding the causes of Western decline helps clarify the objective logic behind the divergence of European countries along the Social Well-Being Index scale.
Those Western countries ranking higher in the SWI—Ireland, Denmark, Slovakia, Belgium, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Norway, Hungary—are relatively small nation-states that have preserved a communal spirit. This spirit is verified by consistent state policies aimed at reducing income inequality, supporting families, and encouraging birth rates.
The Scandinavian countries—Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland—are a characteristic example. They traditionally exhibit low social inequality and active pro-family state policies, forming what is known as the Scandinavian welfare-state model. Its historical roots lie in nation-states created by Luther’s followers, marked by an identity between the civic union and the “people’s,” effectively state, church of the nation.
In the second half of the 20th century this model came to be called Scandinavian socialism, although its ideology and chronology extend far beyond social democracy. It is also tied to the Germanic ethno-cultural world, within which the German Reich once set the example of catch-up modernization through proactive social reformism.
Thus, the Scandinavian model represents a local variant of a broader German social-etatist archetype, common—despite differences—to Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Flemish Belgium. Even where the label “socialism” was never applied, as in the Netherlands and Belgium, similar features persist: relatively low inequality and active public social policy, including family support.
Until recently, social etatism and communal tradition formed the basis of well-being in Germany and Northern Europe, reflected in longevity, reduced inequality through redistribution, and higher-than-EU-average fertility. However, the 2024 SWI no longer records leadership but rather the fading inertia of past prosperity—a comet’s tail. This archetypal model in Western Europe has been eroding, with globalization accelerating its destruction.
With the adoption of the global liberal project as the West’s total ideology, elites in Germany and Northern Europe abandoned social etatism as the core of national tradition and actively participated in dismantling their nations’ foundations. A vivid example is the shift in Germany from Christian, social-state conservatism to godless, cosmopolitan, manipulative elitism under Angela Merkel’s leadership. Liberal breakthroughs in the economy and social mores, combined with the surrender of national interests, inflicted irreparable damage on religion, family, and the national state—the foundations of German prosperity.
In Scandinavia, as elsewhere in the West, religious decline followed the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which marked a new level of individualism and triggered a sharp fertility decline in the 1970s and 1980s. Youth secularization was radical, comparable to that of Anglo-American hippies or French leftist rebels. Sexual freedom restored Scandinavia’s global fame and became a component of Western soft power. Full globalization, however, required economic liberalization and immigration, which were duly implemented—most actively in Sweden and Iceland.
Denmark deserves a special mention. Danes asserted their national character in referendums by rejecting the euro and EU citizenship. Under pressure from the Danish People’s Party, the country adopted strict immigration laws, reducing family reunification and asylum migration. As a result, Denmark has fewer immigrants than other Nordic countries, lower crime, the lowest homicide rate, and the highest fertility in Northern Europe. Notably, native Danish women still have slightly higher fertility than the national average.
A paradoxical trend for modernist and postmodern discourse deserves emphasis: grassroots religiosity—where it still survives in Europe—acts as a factor of social well-being. Fidelity to ancestral faith morally obliges citizens to reproduce, motivates adequate state social policy, and sustains national vitality.
Ireland provides a telling example. As Europe’s most religious country, it combines a higher-than-EU-average fertility rate with low levels of non-European immigration. Compared to the UK and “Old Europe,” Ireland has fewer immigrants from Asia and Africa, lower homicide rates, and high secondary education completion. As a result, Europe’s most religious country also has Europe’s highest social well-being index.
Non-zero religiosity also characterizes Slovakia and Slovenia. This correlates with stronger family structures—19% and 18% of households respectively being complete families with children, versus an EU average of 15%. Accordingly, unlike most EU states, Slovakia and Slovenia avoided drastic fertility declines between 2015 and 2024, maintaining a total fertility rate of about 1.5.
Another illustrative example comes from the Netherlands, where 14% of the population are orthodox Calvinists concentrated in fifteen municipalities—the so-called “Calvinist belt.” These areas vote for conservative parties and exhibit large families with fertility rates around or above 2. By contrast, liberal cities with large immigrant populations face demographic collapse and childlessness.
The map on the left highlights municipalities where the Reformed Political Party receives over 1% of votes in the Dutch general elections. On the map to the right, municipalities are colored to show the percentage of mothers with four or more children.
Как видим, самыми многодетными районами Нидерландов являются именно консервативные протестантские, а не иммигрантские, как можно было подумать. Заметим, что и север страны не слишком привлекателен для иммигрантов, так что там повышенный процент многодетных семей, скорее всего, также относится к коренному нидерландскому населению. Между тем, либеральные города страны, в которых сконцентрирована основная масса населения, включая иммигрантов, переживают демографический кризис с переходом к бездетному и преимущественно бессемейному образу жизни.
As we can see, the areas of the Netherlands with the most children per family are the conservative Protestant ones and not migrant ones as might be assumed. It is notable that the north of the country is not very attractive for migrants, which means that the high number of multi-children families there is likely also thanks to the native Dutch population. Meanwhile, the country’s liberal cities, where most of the population resides, including migrants, are going through a demographic crisis, moving towards a childless and mostly family-less way of life.
The relevance of people’s democracy
German-style social statism is not the only, and today no longer the most relevant, European model of social well-being. Note the high Social Well-Being Index of countries outside “Old Europe” such as Slovakia (6th place in the SWI ranking), Slovenia (10th place), as well as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. It is reasonable to suppose that these countries’ present well-being is connected to the cultural archetype of the “people’s state” that took shape during the socialist period in Central Europe under the influence of the USSR.
Recall that in the official discourse of that historical period these were termed states of “people’s democracy.” Setting aside the accompanying ideological sophistry, it is important to stress the historical link between this political definition and the postwar democratic movement in the form of Popular Fronts, and its emphasis on rejecting the extreme forms of class struggle characteristic of the Soviet-style “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Thus, embedded in the political formula “people’s democracy” was a sound semantic core—the premise that the state should be nationwide, a state of the people.
A socialist background in no way diminishes the merits of the people’s-state model, whose hallmarks include low income inequality, a public system of healthcare for the people, and high coverage of children with full secondary education. The relevance of the East European model is clear when compared with the welfare-state arrangements implemented in the countries of “Old Europe.” That said, some East European countries have decisively abandoned the people’s-state model, pursuing post-socialist liberalization with zeal.
The decile ratio—an indicator of the depth of social inequality—clearly shows how relevant the ideals of the people’s state remain for various post-socialist, including post-Soviet, countries of Central and Eastern Europe. As a benchmark, let us take a decile ratio of 8.8—the average for “Old Europe” (the EU-15), including the United Kingdom.
Decile ratio in Central and Eastern European countries in the early 2020s, multiples
Post-socialist European states with a decile ratio lower than 8.8 are: Belarus (4.7); Slovenia (4.9); Slovakia (5.2); the Czech Republic (5.6); Poland (6.8); Albania (7.5); Hungary (7.5); Croatia (7.7); Estonia (7.8); Moldova (8.0); as well as the partially post-socialist unified FRG (Germany) (8.1).
Those with a decile ratio higher than 8.8 are: Lithuania (10.6); Latvia (11.0); Serbia (11.8); North Macedonia (12.1); Romania (14.2); Montenegro (14.4); Bulgaria (15.5).
This distribution of Europe’s post-socialist states by an indicator of the depth of social inequality is quite informative in the context of assessing social well-being.
Note: Slovenia, which along with Belarus has one of the best outcomes on social equality, also shows the best result in the world for minimizing infant mortality (IMR 1.4‰) and a high life expectancy (80.9 years), the best among post-socialist states.
It is telling that all post-socialist European countries, except Albania and Moldova, ensure low infant mortality. Sixteen of the states listed have an IMR below 6, and nine of them have an IMR below 3—no worse than in “Old,” that is, Western, Europe. This demonstrates the high level of the healthcare systems created and developed in the post-socialist countries.
Infant mortality rate in Central and Eastern European countries in the early 2020s, per mille (‰)
In thirteen post-socialist East European countries, the share of children covered by full secondary education exceeds or equals the average for “Old Europe” (81.8), with Slovakia (96.2%) and Slovenia (95.2%) ranking third and fifth globally on this indicator of social well-being. Characteristically, among all post-socialist European countries, the smallest share of citizens with full secondary education is found only in the partially post-socialist Germany (78.4%).
Coverage by full secondary education in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the early 2020s, percent
The state of the people’s-state model in various post-socialist countries can be described along a spectrum from highly relevant to highly eroded. What is characteristic of virtually all post-socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, however, is a high level of nationalism.
Aggressive, narrowly ethnically defined nationalism is always fraught with primitive neighborly wars verging on genocide. Under conditions of a patchwork of ethnic intermixture, this objectively calls for an imperial political organization. Within the European Union, which has rejected the “Europe of nations” paradigm in favor of the Global Liberal Project paradigm, nationalism is generally suppressed in the interests of the aggregate supranational financial oligarchy. On Europe’s periphery, by contrast, it is supported—for waging war on the Russian World: first against the natural-historical influence and cultural heritage of Russian civilization in adjacent territories, and then against Russian civilization itself in its original geo-historical area.
As the nations of Eastern and Central Europe become aware of their objective interests, a fundamental divergence emerges from the EU’s program of eliminating national sovereignties, and even more so from the globalized West’s war against the Russian World—a foreign war that is extremely harmful and even suicidal for the nations of Eastern and Central Europe.
A sign of the vitality of the nations of Eastern and Central Europe is their active resistance to the immigration openness imposed by globalist elites, which dilutes national identity under the banner of ethno-cultural diversity. States capable of such resistance have, to some extent, shielded themselves from the crime surge currently observed in the EU, preserved a high level of full secondary education coverage among their youth, and, as a result, have a higher Social Well-Being Index.
